Polite Music Gallery11-St. Caecilia (Miss Linley)

St. Caecilia (Miss Linley)

William Dickinson (1746–1823) after Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)
St. Caecilia (Miss Linley)
1776
Mezzotint

Elizabeth Linley was the daughter of a musician, Thomas Linley of Bath, and was famous in her own right for her abilities as a singer and for her beauty, intelligence, and modesty. She married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and sat several times for both Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. 

Here she is shown as Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Fanny Burney, the daughter of the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney, visited Reynolds’s studio in 1775 and saw the painting of “the beautiful Mrs. Sheridan, who is taken seated at a Harpsichord [actually an organ], a while Figure, in Character of Saint Cecilia, a denomination she greatly merits. My father is to supply Sir Joshua with some Greek music to place before her.” 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1977.14.12938